For more than five years, prominent social activist Mary Jo Leddy has lived and worked at Romero House, a Toronto refugee shelter. The first part of At the Border Called Hope, a remarkable and important book, is devoted to accounts of her neighbours’ histories and lively anecdotes about their early encounters with Canadian culture. She writes with evident compassion and affection for these people, whose sunny dispositions and quiet courtesy give no hint of the hells of rape and torture they have been through. Leddy has an ear for dialogue; she does an excellent job of conveying the voices of people struggling to make themselves understood in an unfamiliar language.

When she begins describing the refugees’ struggles to receive fair treatment from the Immigration Department, the book becomes even more compelling. The reader quickly grows to share her controlled outrage at a bureaucratic system which seems astonishingly free of external accountability. The incompetence and sheer arrogance of some of the ministry workers she encounters is breathtaking. (When Leddy informs an official that the case of a family against which he has just issued a removal order is under personal review by the Prime Minister, the official’s only response is, “So what?”)

With clear, simple language and strong storytelling skills, Leddy cuts through the legalese and political bafflegab that so often couch discussions of immigration policy. As this book makes its way into stores, cost-cutting measures in the Canadian immigration system are drawing criticism from refugee advocates. Immigration centres are relying more and more on automated phone systems to handle inquiries; it’s now virtually impossible for many refugee and immigration applicants to get hold of an actual human being, someone who can answer specific questions about their situations instead of just doling out general information. This development is unlikely to surprise Leddy.

“The immigration system,” she writes, “like so many other systems, is designed to render everyone who participates in it faceless.” At the Border Called Hope is an attempt to restore faces and identities to the men, women and children she has spent years working to defend.